Show promises belly dance but focuses more on story than movement

Students who attended last night’s “PURE Reflections: Beauty Reimagined” solely to experience the art of belly dancing may have been sorely disappointed. As director Dixie Fernandez explained, PURE is not a conventional belly dance troupe. It is a troupe made up of real women—attorneys, professionals, interpreters, and even school vice principals—who care about and support each other and express themselves through belly dancing. These women took the audience members on a journey, exploring self-consciousness and issues of self-image.

The message expressed has real-life meaning for the members, each of whom has experienced a personal struggle over self-image. Through this production—which will travel to Connecticut next—the troupe members hope to share their experiences and encourage others to seek support. The chief choreographer and artistic director, Kaeshi Chai, explained that she “saw how healing belly dancing was, and body image was something I had struggled with throughout adolescence.” For her, this troupe is a 14-year-old dream come true.

The dancers expressed real-life stories of battles with self-image in a moving progression of women’s birth to maturity. Four dancers were coupled with mirrors that caused their images to multiply threefold—perhaps representative of themselves, their self-esteem, and their demons. The stories each reflected struggles against self-destructive behaviors such as binging, plastic surgery, cocaine, and cutting. Then, the dancers explained how, with maturity, they reclaimed their healthy self-perceptions—they then demonstrated this comfort with their bodies by dancing through the end of the performance.

Live vocals and percussion supported each dancer’s struggle with the mirror, seen at first as a toy and then as the source of self-destructive patterns. However, the show overall lacked an emphasis on dance. The dancers relied on pantomime, music, and the background montage too often to express their emotions and internal strife. These added elements distracted the audience from the raw and sometimes grotesque reality the dancers attempted to portray. Dance itself is such an expressive art that one has to question the need for props—even the mirrors that played such a large role in the production.

Although all the dancers of PURE are women, Fernandez believes the message is “cohesive to men as well.” The media-driven and body-conscious world can affect men and women equally. She left the audience with these words: “This show is an epiphany of sorts—we all have demons we struggle with. … It [the production] is ageless—there is no prejudice on the stage.”